Did You California Our Tennessee? (Op-Ed By Steve Abramowicz)

The U-Haul economy meets the 287(g) state.

Image Credit: Robert Couse-Baker / PxHere.

Note from The Tennessee Conservative: Editorial statements in this column are the sole opinion of the author; they do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the staff of this publication.

Submitted by Steve Abramowicz of Heartland Journal –

The trucks tell it plainly. Between 2018 and July 1, 2025, Tennessee grew from roughly 6.77 million people to 7,315,076 — a gain of more than 540,000 residents, most of them Americans moving in from other states (Census Bureau estimates). Read the license plates on I-40: New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and since the pandemic a long, unbroken line from California. For years the running joke on both coasts has been “California, our Tennessee” — the idea that enough Left Coast transplants could officially tip the state blue. Could happen. Hasn’t yet: the General Assembly is more Republican than ever, and Nashville is bluer while its exurbs redden. But the arithmetic keeps compounding. Half a million people is the city of Tucson, dropped whole into the Cumberland Plateau, asking about schools.

Now hold that image next to what else Tennessee has been building since 2025.

In a special legislative session, the state created the Centralized Immigration Enforcement Division inside the Department of Safety & Homeland Security, run by a governor-appointed chief with a direct line to Washington. Adopting a sanctuary policy became a felony for officials. A 2026 follow-up orders every county sheriff into a 287(g) agreement with ICE by January 2027 — or the county loses state funding. Driver’s tests are English-only now, with a one-time foreign-language option. Benefits require status verification; licenses require more than a work permit. ICE’s own count: 120 287(g) partners in Tennessee as of September 9 — near the top of the national table. Republicans cite 18,500-plus removals under the current administration. Public trackers, which count detentions rather than removals, put the figure near 15,000 since early 2025, two-thirds of the detainees showing no criminal record or only pending charges (Tennessee Lookout). Cite the first number; audit the second.

Missouri is the patient version of the same instinct. English became the state’s official language in 2008 with 86.31% of the vote (Ballotpedia). Status checks on arrested people date to that same year; the ban on college aid for unlawfully present students to 2009; the sanctuary ban, with funding penalties, to the years after. In 2025, Governor Mike Kehoe put the Highway Patrol into a 287(g) partnership with ICE on Inauguration Day, January 13. Missouri’s reward, according to the chain email that has resurfaced in every enforcement cycle since 2010, is that the state has “no illegals” — and that the media won’t say so. False, as it was false in 2010: about 100,000 unauthorized people live in Missouri by independent estimates. What Missouri actually proves is smaller and more honest. Fifteen-plus years of consistency lowers a pull factor — and a state that was never a destination in the first place gets to claim the credit.

Tennessee’s unfinished fronts tell you where the ambition runs. House Bill 793, Majority Leader William Lamberth’s vehicle for challenging ‘Plyler v. Doe’, would let schools refuse enrollment or charge tuition to children here without status; stalled nearly two years over federal-funding fears, it survives only as a watered-down tracking mandate passed by the House in March. And last week a Davidson County judge blocked the state from verifying immigration status for Ryan White HIV/AIDS patients (Nashville CARES v. Tennessee Department of Health). The laws are largely on the books now. The rate limiter is the courts. The gap Tennessee still wants to close is the one Florida and Texas own: the street-level 287(g) Task Force Model — immigration checks during routine duties, not just jail screening. Tennessee’s 120 partners are mostly jail-screening arrangements. Florida deputizes the highway.

Which brings us back to the trucks. The most aggressively enforced immigration state in America is also one of its great welcome mats — for the domestic kind. No Tennessee statute asks a Californian for papers. E-Verify screens the hired; the U-Haul pulls up unvetted. The transplant arrives with an out-of-state checkbook, a higher tolerance for property taxes, and a vote that arrives on schedule. Nobody in the legislature has proposed a 287(g) agreement for moving companies, though the moving companies change the state more, in aggregate, than any single foreign-born labor flow. That is not an argument against the newcomers. It is an observation about the architecture: one migration gets a felony statute, a mandate, a funding clawback, and a publicity campaign for every ignored detainer; the other gets a tax incentive, a chamber-of-commerce video, and billboards in Los Angeles.

The state’s answer to its one blue county is the same architecture pointed inward. Nashville is both the destination of a large share of those transplants and the place the legislature treats as a special case: no exemptions to the 287(g) mandate, revenue withheld, the county jail told to comply. Preemption is how a supermajority governs a city. The transplants are the ironic margin in that fight — the growth keeps making Nashville more Democratic and the surrounding counties more Republican, and the enforcement statutes keep assuming the opposite.

The attrition-through-enforcement thesis says: make illegal presence expensive, and people leave or never come. The growth thesis says: make moving here cheap, and people come. Tennessee is running both experiments at once, on two different populations, and only one of them got asked for documents. Who decided that? The new Tennesseans did, one driver’s license and one down payment at a time; the ones on the other migration never got that option. The laws decide who belongs.

The trucks don’t read them.